Monday, April 16, 2007

Mount Dana

My flight from SFO to PHL routed between Tahoe and Yosemite. From my right-side window, the view South over the High Sierra was beautifully clear, with no trace of the weekend's storm that made our Saturday and Sunday Tahoe ski tours a bit of a challenge. Starting from Mono Lake, it was easy to find Mount Dana with its twin snow-filled couloirs, Dana Couloir on the left, bracketing the summit, and Dana Plateau below with its cliffs down to Ellery Bowl and to Lee Vining Canyon. Several of the plateau's couloirs were also visible. I kept checking on all of the Tioga Pass peaks I could recognize until the scene disappeared behind the plane. I wasn't able to visit Tioga Pass there this winter or last, and I heard that the last two winters have not been kind to the winter lodge operation at Tioga Pass Resort. I hope they will recover and that I can visit next winter.

About Me

I am VP and Engineering Fellow at Google, where I lead work on natural-language understanding and machine learning. My previous positions include chair of the Computer and Information Science department of the University of Pennsylvania, head of the Machine Learning and Information Retrieval department at AT&T Labs, and research and management positions at SRI International. I received a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and I have over 120 research publications on computational linguistics, machine learning, bioinformatics, speech recognition, and logic programming, as well as several patents. I was elected AAAI Fellow in 1991 for contributions to computational linguistics and logic programming, ACM Fellow in 2010 for contributions to machine-learning models of natural language and biological sequences, and ACL Fellow in 2017 for contributions to sequence modeling, finite-state methods, and dependency and deductive parsing. I was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1993.